Annual General Meeting, 2006

Good evening. Thank you for that warm welcome. It’s wonderful to be here. It’s my first time in Canada but it will not be my last. Since I arrived, a little more than 24 hours ago, your hospitality has been incredible.

And Tony, I really appreciate that kind introduction. I will do my very best to live up to it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I first started working with Tony Bernardo in connection with NRA’s participation in the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities.

The World Forum is the non-governmental organization that represents gun owners and their associations from around the world before the United Nations.

There is no more respected representative from Canada at the World Forum than Tony Bernardo. His knowledge, his ability to work with others, and his leadership skills in defending firearms freedom are well recognized in the international community.

I first met Steve Torino, your vice-president, this summer in New York at the UN Small Arms Conference. Steve was one of the beacons of hope in a room full of enemies determined to eradicate your gun rights.

Tony and Steve do a fantastic job of representing your interests on an international level and I am proud of them.

I want to thank the Canadian Shooting Sports Association and President Gord Dickie and also the Canadian Institute for Legislative Action for the opportunity to speak with you tonight about the National Rifle Association of America and my work as NRA’s president.

My job is to protect, defend and advance the American right to keep and bear arms, as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and particularly the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which states: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Though you don’t have a Second Amendment in Canada, it is amazing how similar things are in your country and in mine when it comes to gun ownership and the fight to preserve.

You fight the same battles against the same enemies of firearms freedom that we do. You deal with the same bias in your media. You labor under the same lack of education among the general public about firearms issues.

And you face the same challenge of trying to recruit members from the ranks of millions of firearms owners who shoot and hunt but who climb onto your backs and let you carry them when it comes to protecting those rights.

God bless you all. You are doing great work under adverse conditions.

And as bad as you think things are here, there are some gun owners in the US that have to live under even more restrictive regulations, like our friends in Massachusetts and New Jersey.

It is amazing what you’ve been able to accomplish in the few short years since CSSA took its present form. You are an inspiration to gun owners internationally and I congratulate you.

And though we Americans have a Second Amendment, without the support of the grassroots, the rights guaranteed by that Constitutional provision can be reduced to nothing more than a piece of paper; a federal judge’s ruling can effectively gut it; and an attorney general’s opinion can trivialize it.

What protects the Second Amendment in America and what protects your common law rights in Canada is the same as what makes a bear dangerous – its size and ferocity.

It’s the size and ferocity of your membership that makes you powerful. The NRA doesn’t have almost 4 million members because it’s powerful, it’s powerful because it has almost 4 million members.

I heard your treasurer say this morning at your annual general meeting that it’s a numbers game and he’s right. The more members you have, the more seriously you will be taken and the less likely the government will be to try to take away your rights.

And there is only one way to increase your membership and that’s by hard work. I heard a gentleman say this morning that some folks had joined his gun club and now he was going to work on getting them to join CSSA. He’s on the right track.

Your officers are doing what they can, but I will tell you what I tell every NRA member I meet. Membership recruitment is your job. It’s up to each and every one of you to get your gun-owning friends and hunting buddies to join CSSA.

Use peer pressure. Shame them into it. You’re fighting for their rights. They should fight alongside you for yours. And the cost of an annual membership is a fraction of the cost of one gun – it’s a small investment in preserving your right to own and use that firearm.

Membership recruitment, fund-raising, media bias, apathy, these are all issues both of our respective organizations face.

But before we talk about these, I will try to answer the question that I am always asked when I speak to groups . . .

How did a woman born in San Francisco, raised in the liberal Bay Area by a family that didn’t own or even talk about firearms, who graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Law School, and went to work for a liberal Los Angeles law firm practicing entertainment law for Hollywood celebrities turn out to be the president of the NRA?

Or as some people have asked when they first meet me, what’s a nice girl like you doing playing with guns?

My story bears telling not because it’s about me but because it’s an example of the power of freedom and the truth of ideas. It’s a lesson for those who try to stereotype gun owners.

When I was growing up, I didn’t know anything about firearms or the Second Amendment. As a young adult studying economics at college, the NRA wasn’t even a blip on my radar screen. I finished college, went straight to law school, graduated, joined a big L.A. firm, worked hard towards making partner and didn’t think much about politics or public policy. And I had never shot a real gun.

Then one night in the early 1980’s, when I was living alone in the Hollywood Hills, I was almost the victim of a home invasion . . .

It was 3:00 am and I was home alone. I awoke with a start to ominous sounds downstairs. It was 1981 and I was living in Los Angeles. I crept down the stairs to the front door of my house and looked through the peephole. What I saw terrified me, and the impact of that moment changed my life.

On the dark porch, there was a large, strange man on the other side of the door, with a screwdriver in hand, pushing the tip of the screwdriver into the door lock.

I refused to panic, and instead focused all of my energy to force myself to think. What should I do?

It was the middle of the night and I thought to myself, “Clearly this man doesn’t realize that there’s someone at home.”

So I banged hard on the door from the inside hoping he would realize someone was home and would go away.

I looked through the peephole, and saw him straighten up, look back at me and bend down and put the screwdriver back in the lock on the door.

I ran to the phone and called my next-door. I lived in a housing development and could have thrown a stone and hit the house next door. The phone rang and rang again. No answer. I called my neighbor on the other side of me. There was no answer there either.

I ran around the house, turning on all the lights. I turned on my upstairs stereo full-blast and opened the second story window, hoping to awaken my neighbors. I made as much noise and light as I could.

I ran downstairs and looked through the peephole. He was still there.

I was in trouble, and running out of options. I called the police and hurriedly explained the situation.

The police finally arrived but the would-be felon had left. Evidently, in the end, he could not make it through the lock on the door.

But that night was a turning point in my life. I promised myself that I would never let this happen again. I would never be defenseless and unprepared again. That night, I realized that I am ultimately responsible for protecting myself.

The next day I went to a gun store. I had never been to a gun store before so I had to look one up in the phone book. I went into the store and the man behind the counter asked if he could help me. I told him I was looking for a gun. He asked me what kind of gun I was interested in and I told him, “any gun.” He looked surprised and asked me what I planned to use the gun for and I told him what had happened the night before.

He suggested that I take a gun safety class first so I did. Part of the class was shooting a pistol on their indoor range. I put all the rounds in the small black circle in the middle of the target. The instructor looked surprised and said, “Are you sure you haven’t done this before?” And I told him, “No.” And he replied, “Well you should keep doing this because you might be good at it.”

Before too long, I had bought my first gun and was going to the range regularly to practice. I met great people at the range who helped me perfect my firearms safety and shooting skills.

One Friday at work, one of my law partners asked me what I was doing that weekend and I told him I was going shooting. He looked shocked and asked disbelievingly, “You have a gun?”

I told him, “Yes.” And he replied, “You’re a dangerous person!”

I didn’t understand his reaction so I asked my friends at the range about it. They told me, “If you want to learn about the politics of gun control, join the NRA.” So I did.

Once I joined the NRA, I was amazed to find out what it was all about. It had a far broader mission, and a much deeper foundation, than I would have ever believed.

The National Rifle Association was founded 135 years ago, in 1871, by Union officers after the Civil War, also known as the War Between the States.

These men were concerned about the poor marksmanship demonstrated by their young soldiers and feared that our country might not be able to adequately defend itself if invaded by a foreign power’s professional army. So they formed the NRA. Its mission was to train young men – civilians – in marksmanship to prepare them to defend, if and when necessary, America’s liberty and sovereignty.

NRA’s Bylaws state that among the purposes and objectives of the Association are:

“To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, especially with reference to the inalienable right of the individual American citizen guaranteed by such Constitution to acquire, possess, collect, exhibit, transport, carry, transfer ownership of, and enjoy the right to use arms, in order that the people may always be in a position to exercise their legitimate individual rights of self-preservation and defense of family, person, and property, as well as to serve effectively in the appropriate militia for the common defense of the Republic and the individual liberty of its citizens.”

The NRA’s objectives also include promoting public safety and the national defense, training members of law enforcement, the armed forces, the militia, and people of good repute in marksmanship, fostering and promoting the shooting sports and amateur competitions, and promoting hunter safety and defending hunting as a sport and as a means of conservation and wise use of our renewable wildlife resources.

Among NRA’s more than 275 shooting and educational programs, is the Eddie Eagle Gunsafe Program.

Launched in 1988, this is an educational program for children from pre-kindergarten through the third grade. It was developed with the help of qualified professionals such as clinical psychologists, reading specialists, teachers, curriculum specialists, urban housing safety officers and law enforcement personnel. The program teaches the following four simple rules to children,

If you see a gun,

• STOP
• Don’t touch
• Leave the area
• Tell an adult.

And by the end of this year, we will have reached 20 million children with Eddie Eagle’s lifesaving message.

In the 18-year period since the NRA started this program, firearms accidents among children in the Eddie Eagle age group have decreased over 80%.

This is just some of the work of the National Rifle Association on behalf of firearms safety and freedom.

And while NRA membership is predominantly male, we haven’t forgotten that women make up more than half of the U.S. population.

In the U.S., about 2 million women hunt and an additional 4 million women target shoot.

So, we have reached out to women with special programs to attract more women to hunting and the shooting sports. NRA’s Women on Target program includes both instructional shooting clinics and hunting adventures.

Taught by women shooting instructors and hunting guides, these all-women programs take the mystery out of learning how to shoot, especially for urban and suburban women who didn’t grow up with firearms in the household.

The Women on Target program started in 2000 and the first year, 500 women attended 13 instructional shooting clinics. By 2005, we had 202 instructional shooting clinics training 5,500 women. Overall, in the past six years, 25,000 women have participated in our shooting and hunting programs.

And for those shooters, men and women alike, looking to hone their competition skills, the NRA offers competitive shooting programs covering all disciplines, from the novice to the world-class competitor. The NRA sanctions over 10,000 shooting tournaments and sponsors over 50 national championships each year.

I know that some of you in this room have been to the National Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio and have enjoyed the fellowship of other shooters and the warm traditions that accompany that event.

The fight to protect all of these programs – and our rights -- from extinction is an ongoing process. With the outcome of the recent US elections, that fight will become that much harder.

With the help of friends like Tony Bernardo at the World Forum, we were successful this past summer in derailing the anti-gun forces that sought to pass an international treaty banning guns worldwide.

The enemies of gun rights are the same all over the world. Your Wendy Cukier is just another version of Rebecca Peters, who was instrumental in passage of the gun bans in England and Australia, countries whose violent crime rates have skyrocketed since law abiding citizens were forced to give up their guns. Rebecca Peters’ response to gun owners who objected that they should not have to give up their firearms, was “Find another sport.”

Let’s face it. For Wendy and Rebecca, funding is not an issue. Their funding is unlimited, they receive governmental funding, they receive grants from private foundations. Hollywood celebrities and other wealthy individuals freely donate their time and money.

In Canada as in America, gun control advocates are the darlings of the media. They get invited to the best Hollywood parties, and after the recent US elections, they will be out in full force in Washington, DC.

But what they don’t have and what we do, is the truth and millions of people who believe in it.

It’s our job to motivate those people, enlist them in the cause of firearms freedom, and together show our respective governments that law-abiding, peaceable gun owners are not the problem but the solution.

To do that, we must unite and work together as a single force. We cannot let our small differences divide us. We cannot let the anti-gun crowd turn hunters against pistol shooters, and gun collectors against trap shooters. Ultimately, all guns are the same, and all gun owners are the same.

If we allow the enemy to pit us one against another, it will be like George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where one by one, each species of animal was eliminated because the rest of the animals refused to protect the ones who weren’t like them -- until the last group of animals were killed because no one was left to protect them.

Or as one of America’s forefathers, Benajamin Franklin, graphically put it, “We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

We must be serious about the enormous challenges we currently face on both sides of our shared border. We must resist renewed attacks on our ownership and use of firearms, we must attract new members to our mutual cause and educate them about the importance of hunting and sport shooting, we must urge them to become active politically to protect their rights.

That’s a lot to do, and whether you live in Tampa or Toronto, Arizona or Alberta, Minneapolis or Montreal, we want the same thing. We want to live peacefully, enjoy our right to own and use firearms, keep the hunting tradition alive and well, and pass our firearms freedoms undiminished to the next generation.

So keep up the good fight. We are warriors all, and we can win.